The fabric of my life

I’ve all my life loved clothes, everything about them. I like fabric and stitches and pleats and darts and tucks and frills and French seams. What clothes mean and the messages they convey, the transformations they can bring about and the different sorts of treatment they provoke, none of these things seems to me the least bit superficial. What clothes actually do to the way you look, I’ve known, for a long time, is only one part of their power.

I’ve always felt there was an aspect of glamour that contained a moral element. I can’t explain it exactly but it’s something to do with optimism, cheer and celebration, glamour being a language that denotes great faith in life. I’m amazed when people of intelligence won’t see that clothing is important beyond the sphere of appearances. Yet I’ve never really questioned my beliefs about clothes and where they came from, not until two years ago when I began working on a memoir, My Judy Garland Life, and revisited the enormous part that fashion played in my childhood years.

I can’t say that my childhood was particularly fashionable, whatever that means. We wore what we wore, we weren’t “turned out” in accordance with any deeply held beliefs about appearances. We were never ambassadors for my parents’ ideas about style. Besides, we were a family of five children and there weren’t buckets of cash. My mother is a dashing person, and she took my four brothers and sisters round the world on a cargo ship, for an adventure, but that happened before I was born, so there wasn’t any modish swashbuckling in my era. We knew a number of painters, but we had no salon life at home, thank God; there weren’t many evenings where the badinage was so witty that it woke the neighbours. My sisters were beautiful and sought after but that’s hardly unusual in the world of teenage girls. We went to school, we had roast dinners on Sundays round a long scrubbed table and excessive Christmases and birthdays. I did my homework in my chocolate-brown school uniform, often in front of the television because we had so much schoolwork, hours and hours of it every night, that it was the only way I could keep up with my viewing.

Fashion had a vital role in my upbringing because of my mother’s work, which was selling old clothes in a small shop in north London, the sort of garments that are now grandly labelled vintage but at that time were considered, by the uninitiated, only a few steps up from jumble. Fluttering on padded hangers from all the doorways in our house were 1930s dresses in wool crêpe or crêpe de chine, tweed jackets with nipped-in waists, beaded cardigans, 1950s flowered frocks, the odd bias-cut evening dress, and lingerie in cotton, rayon and silk – and these items frequently fell on my head as I passed between rooms.

I helped my mother sometimes, unpicking stitches from a badly done hem, threading ribbons (pale blue or ballet shoe pink) through the slits in a crisp cotton petticoat, waving floppy velvet flowers into clouds of kettle steam until their petals sprang back to life. By the age of six or seven I knew at a glance the difference between a peach satin nightdress that was made of rayon and one that was of silk. I knew how to spot if lace or embroidery was created by hand. I was aware of the status of garments and the deep hierarchies involved. I felt for the synthetics and the humble home-made gowns for I could soon separate the clothes that had been created amateurishly, out of economy, from the ones that revealed a dressmaker’s expertise or a famous designer’s acute eye.

Our evenings often had a shoemaker’s elves quality to them, as my mother darned and rinsed and starched and I sat at her feet sorting rags. In the evenings in our basement kitchen a cauldron full of white Victorian cottons bubbled almost continually, sending damp soapy fumes into the air and a scent just like spaghetti. “What’s for supper, Mum?” I’d joke. “Smells lovely.”

“Oh, just some old bloomers and a few camisoles,” she would laugh. We were very close, my mother and I. Sometimes while she sewed I brushed her hair for a penny a minute and sang her Judy Garland songs.

The shop had high standards and sometimes I was given things that weren’t quite good enough, which I pedalled myself from a cardboard box, with a napkin for a tablecloth, by the caged glass door: bags of odd buttons, a lace collar with a small stain or crocheted mats or a jumper whose fibres had become slightly matted due to incautious laundry procedures. I specialised in items that had, in any way, “gone”. How could your heart not go out to them? Often the pieces I worked on myself fell into the seconds pile because I was keen but not skilled.

During this time two of my older sisters had jobs at Vivienne Westwood’s shop Seditionaries (later called SEX) and, while my mother and I sold the clothes of the past, my siblings dispensed the latest bondage trousers and T-shirts emblazoned with pairs of pert bosoms. There was no rivalry about these wildly differing styles of clothing: we all appreciated quality and good design. Besides, punk and Victoriana were not unnatural bedfellows.

Many of my clothes were home-made by my mother, in part because we did not have much money, but also because I was – how to put it nicely – large. I had gathered skirts and A-line dresses embroidered with lazy daisies, one of which made its way into the Islington Gazette when the mayor presented me with my cycling proficiency badge. Occasionally, my mother would find something for me among the old clothes: a Chinese silk blouse, or a bright cotton dress: one printed with colourful presents wrapped with bows I wore until it was in shreds.

As human beings are perverse, I became obsessed with looking brand new and hankered after proper clothes bought from shops. I prized neatness above everything. A girl at school whose father was a policeman mesmerised me with her outfits, which were utterly immaculate and irreproachable. She had pale pink ironed needlecord pedalpushers and bright white T-shirts from Marks & Spencer and they stayed that way all day. Her uniformly dark and glossy hair was parted to the side and held in place by a Kirby grip of exactly the same hue. How did you get hair to do that? She might as well have been from Mars. I know now that neatness is not the be-all and end-all, if anything it’s really an absence, yet I’m still drawn to square-ish clothes that make me look efficient, as though I’m crisp in a crisis and can do everything very fast and very well.

I’ve been conscious from an early age that although I’m fascinated by everything to do with clothes, my personality has, itself, always been quite out of fashion. I am an ardent person and ardour by definition is the antithesis of cool. I like sincerity and people with passions, show tunes, cake decorating, warmth and flair and Judy Garland. I am a hero-worship person and, unashamedly, always seeking out people to elevate and enthrone. Hero worship, these days, lacks any sort of status and is dismissed with embarrassment as a loser’s pursuit, a low form of living, of loving, for those who cannot muster any better. But it’s so much more than this. If you tower high on a pedestal, it needn’t follow that I’m cast down. You can raise me up! It is possible to harbour devotion with intelligence and style. With your hero, you can relax and examine your triumphs and failings to your heart’s content; there’s no need for restraint or anything cautious or artificial. You can go over your rough workings till you can see what the fair copy of yourself will entail. Besides, spending long periods of time holding another person in sky-high regard broadens our capacities to love.

All these influences don’t exactly help when deciding how to dress my own children. They are not reacting against the same things as I did, and do not look to their clothes to correct certain ideas they fear the world might form. I wanted my clothes as a girl to say, to boast, even, that I was cheerful and competent, but I don’t need my children’s clothes to make any such claims. I like children in clothes that do not say anything at all but, of course, if you are knowing and your friends are, these are the hardest clothes to find of all.

Set against this desire not to be guessed or even second-guessed are my natural feelings about children. I think children should look wholesome and respected and wear clothes that show they are prized. I like garments that vaguely suggest granny’s a good knitter and that a hayloft might feature in the afternoon’s play. I suppose I like clothes that suggest care has been taken and attention has been paid. I lean towards the dignified. Yet a child who is too “well dressed” is a worrying sight.Who can forget Fraulein Maria’s first glimpse of the Von Trapp children sailor-suited to within an inch of their lives? “When do they play?” she asked. “They march,” she was informed.

Today’s fashionable children – that is, the children of fashionable people – generally follow a familiar code. They wear something luxurious or classic paired with something very humble or mildly witty, just as their mothers do. Every strong theme requires an accompanying diluting impulse. For every velvet collar there must be a madcap stripy sock, for every bit of smocking a rough brown boot. If Velázquez is invoked he must be cut to size by Dennis the Menace. So the children that go to the fancier parties we attend may arrive orphan deluxe, in their tweeds, grey wools and fawn Viyellas, the hint of austerity set off by something suddenly modern and unexpected like a self-designed Day-Glo Nike trainer.

Now and then my children wear outfits that conform in this way: red and white polka dot flamenco shoes with navy tights, a little Victorian nightie as a sundress, or a pale grey kilt like the ones I wear. But I don’t like them being dressed with too much thought, although I know this notion in itself counts as thought. Nobody wants to resemble the lady who shouted down the horseshoe staircase, “Bring me the child who goes with my blue gown.” I sometimes wonder if I should put more effort into their styling. I know it is almost time for my oldest to look somehow “cool” but I dread that day. At heart, perhaps, I believe that children have no real need of enhancement.

Occasionally, I find it painful to see a child who is dressed thoughtlessly in an outfit that is unflattering, but then I remember my green-and-purple bikini from when I was eight. I loved that bikini and lobbied for it mercilessly and wore it a great deal, sometimes, at weekends, around the house, with just a cardigan. I know for certain it did me no favours: I remember the indulgent looks of my relatives to this day but, nonetheless, I felt jaunty in it and surprisingly carefree.

Besides, I have never as an adult worn a bikini, so if were not for this youthful dalliance with the skimpy two-piece, I would not have had any bikini life at all. And, thankfully, there are no photographs.

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Details

Susie Boyt will be performing with Graham Rawle in ‘Tea with Dorothy’, as part of the Gold Festival at Shoreditch Town Hall, London, at 4pm on Saturday; www.GOLD08.co.uk. On October 9 she will take part in a debate about ‘The Wizard of Oz’ at the ICA, London, at 6.30pm. Her memoir My Judy Garland Life (Virago, £15.99) is published this week